Summary:
Ted: "Node is cancer, because it's not the one true tool that can do everything! It may be good at IO bound code but it's not so hot at CPU bound stuff".
Node hackers: "Yes it is the one true tool!".
Me: face-palm.
OK, Threads can be used to do anything, but they are hard, while async is pretty easy (unless you want to do CPU bound stuff). async sucks for CPU bound stuff, but that's not the problem it's trying to solve (and anyone who makes a big fuss over it from either side is a fool). But none of this really matters much, until you actually need to scale.
If you are doing something simple, C or Java will be best, simply because they are faster. But not everyone uses C or Java, and it's not like speed matters that much when your App server can scale trivially, your DB is the real bottleneck, and you only have 3 users (one of whom is your cat).
If you need a lot of connections, some of which block (due to a call to a web service like BrowserID or Facebook - and there's a lot more web sites that need to be optimized for web APIs calls rather than calculating Fourier transforms), you need lots of processes (which is too heavy in Python), lots of threads (and then you need thread-safety, which is a pain, and very easy to screw up), or something async like Twisted or Tornado. Given that Tornado is already really easy to use, and basic async stuff is fairly easy to get right, the choice is easy for me. (I don't know enough about JS, Node, and V8 to really comment on Node, but I'll just assume it's roughly equivalent).
The thing is, I just don't trust threads (at least, not if I'm doing the code). There's far too many ways you can have weird bugs that won't show up without a massive testing system, or when you get a non-trivial number of users. And you can't integrate existing libraries without jumping through a lot of hoops.
Using callbacks looks like "barely even moves" to me, while multi-threaded code looks like a "spinning roundhouse kick", but then, maybe I'm just not good at multi-threaded code.
I guess the most important things is that threads need to be 100% thread-safe. Async code only has the be "async-safe" in the bits that need to be async. It looks like this:
@async
def do_something():
do_something_not_async_safe()
do_something_async(callback=finish_up)
def finish_up():
do_something_else_not_async_safe()
Whereas threads look like this:
def threaded_code():
do_something_100_percent_thread_safe()
do_more_thread_safe_stuff()
# fail here when you have a few users
do_something_that_uses_an_unsafe_library()
more_thread_safe_stuff()
If you really need to do CPU bound stuff, async sucks. You can create a second server, which handles the CPU bound stuff (and call it using a web interface which
is async safe). Or there are pretty easy ways to call a subprocess asynchronously. But arguing over the merits of async programming using Fibonacci sequences as a talking point is not even wrong. Anyone who brings it up is just showing themselves to be a complete tool. That might be what Ted was trying to do (as many of the Node responses have been unbelievably lame), but it doesn't prove anything except that the internet has trolls, and plenty of idiots who still take the bait.